Personal data of innocent citizens must be made available to the Government to combat terrorism, according to an influential former security chief.

Sir David Omand, Whitehall’s former and security and intelligence coordinator, called for unprecedented Big Brother powers to allow access to private details – including phone records, emails and travel information – to be given to the intelligence services.

Setting out a hugely controversial blueprint for the future of national security he said ‘moral rules’ about individual privacy would have to be broken.

His 17-page report calls for the creation of a vast state database to gather information about terrorist groups which are increasingly recruiting and operating online.

But he argued that a citizen’s right to privacy would have to be sacrificed to allow ‘intrusive’ intelligence techniques.

‘Finding out other people’s secrets is going to involve breaking everyday moral rules’, he wrote.

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

‘This is personal information about individuals that resides in databases, such as advance passenger information, airline bookings and other travel data, passport and biometric data, immigration, identity and border records, criminal records,and other governmental and private sector data, including financial and telephone and other communications records.’